YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS UP: Slave galleries at New North Church

“They are the best seat in the house,” I tell folks who look up from the sanctuary of New North Church to the so called “slave galleries” that are located close to 30 feet high and just a few feet below the ceiling – men's on one side, women's on the other. Although the Massachusetts Constitution...

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By The Rev. Bill Turpie/columnist

The Dedham Transcript

By The Rev. Bill Turpie/columnist

Posted Feb. 9, 2014 at 5:00 PM

By The Rev. Bill Turpie/columnist
Posted Feb. 9, 2014 at 5:00 PM

» Social News

"They are the best seat in the house," I tell folks who look up from the sanctuary of New North Church to the so called "slave galleries" that are located close to 30 feet high and just a few feet below the ceiling – men's on one side, women's on the other. Although the Massachusetts Constitution of 1781 effectively outlawed slavery, New North's galleries were still constructed in 1806 to separate blacks from whites. These were used by many of Hingham's African-American servants. I walk up there from time to time and try to imagine what it might have been like to sit on the narrow benches positioned against the walls, and I muse about what was the message that the people who sat there heard and how did it resonate? Did they hope the service lasted long so they didn't have to get back to cleaning the houses or tilling the land of their employers? It is difficult to know how people will respond to adversity. They constantly surprise and intrigue. Recently Hollywood has become fascinated with the experience of slavery. "Django Unchained" and "Twelve Years a Slave" are vivid reminders of the terrors and injustice of the slave experience. People were kidnapped and transported thousands of miles from home and family. The majority was forced into wretched labor and dehumanizing treatment. The racism of our day has deep linkage to the enslavement of those times.

"Twelve Years a Slave" may win the Oscar for Best Picture. The acting is riveting, the cinematography mesmerizing. Many of the scenes are too intense to watch. It is hard to keep your eyes on the screen because the vividness of calculated insensitivity is troubling to absorb. But maybe we have needed a refresher course in what the institution of slavery was really like in this country. It has been easy to turn away from, but less easy to deny. And now we have this cinematic recounting burning in our consciences. The movie is based on the true story of a free black man who was kidnapped and taken to the south. He barely escaped his plight after 12 years and then wrote about it. At the time his book received a lot of attention. But there are other accounts that are also revealing. One features John Parker, a former slave, who became a conductor on the Underground Railroad. His experiences are recounted from interviews with a Philadelphia newspaper reporter in a book called "His Promised Land." It tells the story of a young child, separated from his mother and forced to march from Virginia to Mobile, Alabama, where he was sold on the auction block. Parker had a fierce intelligence and an equally fierce anger. He is close to a Django figure – tough and resourceful. Amazingly Parker was one of the few who were able to buy his own freedom. He wound up in Ripley, Ohio, which became a hot bed of the abolition movement. But he never forgot where he came from and would sneak across the Ohio River to rescue slaves held in Kentucky and put them on the railroad to Canada. He is reputed to have helped close to 400 people find their way to freedom. Yet his story is not well known.

Page 2 of 2 - We have forgotten how this country was forged by this evil practice – how racism may be a mechanism of forgetting terrible injustice, justified by our inability to see a common humanity in all of our citizens. Parker actually was the first black man to hold a patent. He established a company that employed both blacks and whites. He sounds like a success story – he had four children, all of whom went to college. But his exploits took a toll. He never would allow anyone to take his picture. He was fearful two decades after the Civil War that he would still be hunted down for his efforts at freeing so many slaves.

Solomon Northup wrote his book, went on the lecture circuit and sued the men who kidnapped him, but no one knows how his life ended. Researchers have never been able to find his grave or any record of his death. There is speculation he was murdered. The fact is that both men lived remarkable lives, both were heroic and defiant in their efforts to make the United States aware of what was happening to slaves – but both were still wary of just how threatening their experiences and their continuing existence was for a nation still struggling with what their existence in this country really meant.

Although New North Church gained a reputation as a bulwark of the abolition movement, when I stand in the pulpit those "slave galleries" force me to remember that the experience of slavery is never really absent from our lives. I wonder whether Parker and Northup wouldn't be pleased that these colonial seating arrangements have been left for posterity to ponder.

Since 2007 Bill Turpie has been pastor of New North Church in Hingham. New North is a community church with a focus on the inward journey of faith and an outward journey of service. Before coming to New North he worked for two decades as a business reporter and documentary producer and for many years ran his own production company.